Brightness Reef

Alvin’s Tale

I tried reading Finnegans Wake once upon a time.

Last year.

A lifetime ago.

It’s said that no non-Earthling has ever grokked that book. In fact, the few humans who managed the feat spent whole chunks of their lifespans going over Joyce’s masterpiece, word by obscure word, with help from texts written by other obsessed scholars. Mister Heinz says no one on the Slope has any hope at all of fathoming it.

Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and so the next time our schoolteacher headed off to Gathering, I nagged him to bring a copy back with him.

No, I’m not about to say I succeeded. Just one page into it, I knew this was a whole different venture from Ulysses. Though it looks like it’s written in prespace English, the Wake uses Joyce’s own language, created for a single work of art. Hoonish patience would not solve this. To even begin to understand, you have to share much of the author’s context.

What hope had I? Not a native speaker of Irish-English. Not a citizen of early twentieth-century Dublin. Not human. I’ve never been inside a “pub” or seen a “quark” close up, so I can only guess what goes on in each.

I recall thinking — maybe a little arrogantly — If I can’t read this thing, I doubt anyone else on Jijo ever will.

The crisp volume didn’t look as if anyone had tried, since the Great Printing. So why did the human founders waste space in Biblos with this bizarre intellectual experiment from a bygone age?

That was when I felt I had a clue to the Tabernacle crew’s purpose, in coming to this world. It couldn’t be for the reasons we’re told on holy days, when sages and priests read from the sacred Scrolls. Not to find a dark corner of the universe to engage in criminally selfish breeding, or to resign from the cosmos, seeking the roads of innocence. In either of those cases, I could see printing how-to manuals, or simple tales to help light the way. In time, the books would turn brittle and go to dust, when humans and the rest of us are ready to give them up. Kind of like the Eloi folk in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

In neither case did it make any sense to print copies of Finnegans Wake.

Realizing this, I picked up the book once more. And while I did not understand the story or allusions any better than before, I was able to enjoy the flow of words, their rhythms and sounds, for their own extravagant sake. It wasn’t important anymore that I be the only person to grok it.

In fact, there came a warm feeling as I turned the pages and thought — someday, someone else is going to get more out of this than I did.

On Jijo, things get stored away that seem dead, but that only sleep.

I’ve been pondering that very thought while lying here in constant pain, trying to bear it stoically whenever strange, silent beings barge into my cell to poke me with heat, cold, and prickly sharpness. I mean, should I feel hope as metal fingers probe my wounds? Or sour gloom that my blank-faced tenders refuse to answer any questions, or even to speak? Shall I dwell on my awful homesickness? Or on the contrary thrill over having discovered something wonderfully strange that no one on the Slope ever suspected, not since the g’Keks first sent their sneakship tumbling into the deep?

Above all, I wondered — am I prisoner, patient, or specimen?

Finally I realized — I just don’t have any framework to decide. Like the phrases in Joyce’s book, these beings seem at once both strangely familiar and completely unfathomable.

Are they machines?

Are they denizens of some ancient submarine civilization?

Are they invaders? Do they see us as invaders?

Are they Buyur?

I’ve been avoiding thinking about what’s really eating away at me, inside.

Come on, Alvin. Face up to it.

I recall those final duras, when our beautiful Wuphon’s Dream shattered to bits. When her hull slammed against my spine. When my friends spilled into the metal monster’s mouth, immersed in cold, cold, cold, cruel water.

They were alive then. Injured, dazed, but alive.

Still alive when a hurricane of air forced out the horrid dark sea, leaving us to flop, wounded and half dead, down to a hard deck. And when sun-bright lights half-blinded us, and creepy spider-things stepped into the chamber to look over their catch.

But memory blurs at that point, fading into a hazy muddle of images — until I awoke here, alone.

Alone, and worried about my friends.